What do you do when you cannot land a job and every attempt sees you becoming more and more disappointed and despondent? Logically, the longer you are doing something, the better you should get at it. Practice makes perfect, the adage goes, but it couldn’t be further from the truth when this is applied to futile attempts at job hunting. The longer you have to be at it, means the longer you are without a job.

Here is a somewhat strange and uncommon submission but people have found that for some unfathomable reason it works. Set yourself, a must have a job by that time deadline. Let it be a fixed date, no ifs and buts or thereabouts and around there type of schedules. “I must have a job by the 31^st of December.” Or “On my wife’s birthday in November I am going to gift her with the news that I have landed a job.”

The first thing this will do is to make your past disappointments history. The future is what you are looking to. You have given yourself a fixed amount of time within which you have to achieve your objective. Instead of seeing the future as a blank space, you have now filled it with something constructive, something positive. You are pressing the reset the button and starting afresh, charged and energized.

Suppose you have given yourself around 4 weeks, a reasonable time, to ensure that you do everything possible that you do to get that job.

Think about where you went wrong in the earlier attempts and make a new must-redo list. Rewrite you resume. Make it up-to-date and make sure that it is effective. Think of your job from a difference perspective and see the difference that it makes. Join a networking group and ensure that your job hunt has a wider audience.

If you are not already on LinkedIn, set up your profile on the site. Put yourself on Twitter and Facebook. Remember that just as you are looking for an employer, they are looking for the right employee on these sites. Instead of these sites finding a job for you, jobs could find you.

Don’t stay stuck on your old ways. Try something that you haven’t tried before? Many a time it is found that when attempts to find a job become unsuccessful and days turn to weeks and weeks to months, there is a lessening of enthusiasm and we let our longing flag.  Reignite that fire. The job could be round the next corner for all you know.

You must be thinking, what if my deadline arrives but my job does not? Will my disappointment be even more intense? Do I quit? Do I extend my deadline? Well, to be honest, this is all a mind game and no one can really predict when the job will come.

However setting a deadline will make you believe that you are the master of your fate and you are the captain of the ship, steering it in the direction you want it to go.

Moreover, don’t be disappointed if you cannot get a job by the deadline period. If it has replaced feelings of disappointment, frustration and disenchantment with ones of optimism, hopefulness and confidence, it was worth it.